I’ve got the gig of designing / building the new OpenOn website. I must admit I was pretty lucky with this, being giving minimal spec, usually not a lucky thing, but as they are a forward thinking company I went to town on adding value with every useful bell and whistles I could think off.

I have done an initial mockup and it was received well. So well in fact that I have been told to start on the markup!

We are yet to decide whether to use html 5, html 5 ready or xhtml 1 strict. This decision will be taking next week (the site is due to be up by the 12th June).

I am again standing on the shoulders of giant’s regarding the markup, and in particular and keen to adopt Malarky’s conventions for this one. In fact I already hav!

The site itself is to be a major overhaul and features:

• Accessibility
• Semantics (I was Hiltler-ish on this one)
• Product and Service portfolio’s, which also pull feeds off the product development blogs
• Company blog
• Personnel Biographies with links to their other sites (blogs, homepages, last.fm etc)
• Multiple contacts (with vcard download and hcard)
• Twitter integration

What have I got myself into? What have I designed!

I was simply told to “design a new site” but where is the fun in that? A site should suit the client.

With quite a lot of information to present to a (largely) non-technical crowd, the IA and the design where worrying points for me. I have based the initial design around a 12 column grid, with liberal use of the golden section. At the moment we are undecided on fixed-width, fluid or elastic layout.

Right, quick update over, better get coding!